


Frozen in Time

by Bloodyvalentine



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Muggle, Curses, Historical Accuracy, Historical Inaccuracy, Lost and Found, M/M, Temporary Character Death, Writing Prompt, a brief history of england, fast-forwards 1400 years, i literally dont know how to tag this, it's semi-researched, read the prompt it explains better, statue, statue as main character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-03
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 13:14:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21320743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bloodyvalentine/pseuds/Bloodyvalentine
Summary: There's a beautiful statue of a person in the middle of a large city, and the rumour surrounding the statue is that when they touch hands with their soulmate, they will become human. Naturally, it becomes a perfect photo and video opportunity to pose while holding its hand.One cute selfie attempt results in an empty statue podium and you just barely catching a very confused person in your arms.(An ages old prompt by @writing.prompts on instagram)Dean resigns to being stuck there for eternity, and to make the best out of what he'd see.He's surprised he actually loves watching the time pass. At least he used to, for the first two centuries. Then, at some point, it just turns into a longing to live again, and painful memories of when he was still... human.A story that was supposed to be lighthearted, but is more sad and heartfelt than anything else now.
Relationships: Seamus Finnigan/Dean Thomas
Comments: 4
Kudos: 40





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story took a very long time for me to actually finish, and I'm still not super excited about how it turned out, but like it well enough. Also, it got massively out of hand.  
I took the trope and thought "Hey, what if i made this start with Deans point of view and then jump to Seamus a little later?"  
Yeah, the story took a very different route. But you'll see.

Dean froze when he was nineteen, and he still remembers the day like it was yesterday. Everything about the day had been perfect, at least in his opinion, because it was just warm enough for it to be comfortable and all the work for the day was done, so he could sneak out and spend the evening roaming the town with his best friend. No one ever bothered them, though they gave weird glances to them, a pale English boy dragging around a boy with skin as dark as his. Dean and Seamus never cared.  
They had hung out at the riverside, watching the washwomen tend to their clothes, then decided to take a stroll through town, ending up on town square. They were chasing each other around like kids, but they didn't care if they looked ridiculous. Dean jumped up on a little platform that Seamus had skipped over, reached out for his friend, and suddenly, everything felt weird. His body tingled and he felt frozen, unable to move even a centimetre, not even blink. All he could to was watch as Seamus struggled to lean towards him, and then fell over. For a second, he could hear Seamus' voice, screaming a promise for all to hear.  
“I'll come back to you, D. I'll come back and save you.”  
So he idly stood by as he watched his neighbours carry away his best friend, and continued watching on. But Seamus didn't return, and a few days later, he saw a procession carry a casket out into the woods. Dean resigned to being stuck there for eternity, and to make the best out of what he'd see.

~~ 

He's surprised he actually loves watching the time pass. At least he used to, for the first two centuries. Then, at some point, it just turns into a longing to live again, and painful memories of when he was still... human.  
He still remembers when he was younger, and the small town he grew up in survived solely on their own crops and vegetables, their self-raised cattle. There was no big trade back then, travel was too complicated in the middle of nowhere. It's a big, busy city now, buzzing with life and people of all colours and shapes and sizes, even though the times they built things in are kind of fading into each other in his brain. The many centuries are too much to handle for his brain. He shouldn't have to remember all of this. 

Dean learns a lot about the new times from his place on his pedestal.  
So many things happen. He hears from the stories people tell around him. How a Spaniard (whatever that is nowadays) discovered a new way to India over seas, and later how it wasn't actually India, but an entire new continent. Watches the wars around him, and there are so, so many of them. People can never seem to get along, they're always fighting, and he doesn't understand what about. The city gets damaged and broken down so, so many times, but Dean's statue stands among the ruins absolutely unfazed by bombs and grenades, weather and time. Everything changes every time it's broken, except for him. He always stays the same. 

He listens in on the newspaper boys shouting big headlines around, stories of war and politics and the discoveries of science. How kings fall and rise. How politics change to become a democratic system (though no one ever really bothers to explain that to him? He's a statue though, why would they). It's fascinating, but also so overwhelming to follow along. The new things replace many of his old memories, though the first centuries always stay, engraved in his brain. He can barely remember the years from the so-called 13th to 19th century nowadays. He only remembers that for quite some time, people speak so weirdly, somehow fluffed over, that he takes a long time to know what they mean, and never gets the details of a conversation. So Dean is not only a silent spectator, he feels like he's a secluded one as well. Has lost all touch to the country he's lived in, been suspended in, for almost a thousand years. 

The clothings change, so so much in a single century that he can hardly keep up with what to expect next. Clothes get more colourful, and at some point become predominantly dark again, just to be exchanged for a mass of rainbows crossing the streets the next decade. He used to be able to tell rich from poor just by the colours they wore, now he can't anymore. They're all wearing such nice paints, though sometimes they hurt his eyes with how bright they are.  
The mentality changes, from year to year, from person to person. People care less about others and more about themselves, then more about others again. They hurry past everything around them, only focused on work and money and family, they stroll slowly through the area to take everything in and to remember the place they are in forever. The invention of cameras changes that slowly but surely, and even quicker once they manage to make cameras portable (what an incredible feat! Carrying a machine that can create super realistic paintings of surroundings and people in a bag with you,what a fantastic thing, though Dean has no understanding at all of how it works), but it also makes people see his pretty city square though nothing but a lens, never actually watch it themselves. Dean thinks it's sad that they don't. 

People become more accepting. He watches slave trade become illegal, people getting more rights,watches the women's equality protests and how they get the right to vote.  
But he still thinks of Seamus.  
Sometimes he thinks that they could've been way more than they were, now that he sees all of what is possible in those wild new times. With the overview he has over the city square from his podium, he can see couples holding hands even though they don't share the colour of their skin, or are the same sex, and sometimes he even sees them kissing each other. The highlight of this decade might be the day he saw a young man, maybe a year or two older than Dean before he froze, proposing to his boyfriend.  
Dean learned a lot about himself in those recent years. He's pretty sure he's in love with the 20th century.

People seem to tell his story through all the centuries. He assumes it started in his own time, with people seeing him freeze and hearing Seamus yell, and telling others what happened. But over time, it got prettied up and tilted to be a romance story. Their names are forgotten, and at some point, they become a tragic couple in love, cursed by a jealous witch. Around the same time, people also stop talking of Seamus as himself, and make him a girl to fit the romantic mystery trope. Dean hates it. He just wants Seamus.  
“Once his soulmate comes back to touch his hand, he'll be human again”, they say, and “Get up and touch his hand, maybe it's you!”, they say to their sisters and friends, and people laugh and jump up on his pedestal to grab his hand, just like Seamus never could. Dean's heart breaks a little more every time, until he feels like it must be lying shattered to pieces at the bottom of his ribcage.  
He remembers every single one of them, even though there are more and more every year.

~~

Through all the centuries, there's one thing that Dean remembers most vividly, though. It's a single person that always, always returns, walking up to his statue but staying a safe distance away, always stopping right at the same spot in front of him. The person never looks the same, but Dean feels a deep ache in his chest whenever they look at him. Somehow deep down, from the way they walk, and the way they sit and the way they look at him, like they're trying to remember something but can't, he can tell that it's Seamus. He doesn't know how it works, or how he knows, he just does.  
And he really wishes that Seamus would just come up to him and touch him and not be so far away from him, but he feels like it's somehow not the time yet, not possible for them. It's incredibly frustrating and he longs for it to be over, though seeing some version of Seamus in front of him also gives him hope that one day it will be over. It's a slow and sweet torture, seeing his best friend again every two or three generations, visiting him once and then not again for another fifty years. That is, until 1680. After that, Seamus doesn't appear again, and Dean's suffering gets worse. 

~~  
Seamus is born in early 1980, the son of a happy married couple in the suburbs of a bigger Irish town. He has a beautiful childhood, great friends and good family life, but he can't help like there's always something missing. Sometimes he feels like he can see someone out of the corner of his eye, feel a familiar, comforting presence next to him, but when he turns toward it out of habit, it's gone, and the empty space in his heart and brain feels even heavier.  
He's seventeen and he tries to date, but girls just aren't that interesting to him. Yeah, he can tell when they're pretty, he can say they're nice, but he just really couldn't care less about kissing them.  
When he describes that to his friends, they laugh.  
“Maybe you're just gay Seamus, ever thought about kissin' dudes? That'd explain why you don't like girls”, they say, and Seamus really begins to consider.  
He goes out with a guy then, a nice bloke called Lee, and he figures that yeah, that's definitely the right direction for him. Kissing Lee is nice and warm and feels more comfortable than any girl he'd kissed, but it's still not quite the right thing. They are better off just being friends, they decide.  
It helps him settle quite some things for himself, though. Being into boys means he has a reason for why he feels so indifferent about girls. It also means he has a reason for the way he feels about the boy that appears in his dreams sometimes. He doesn't know him when he's awake, can hardly remember a face, but it's a touch of a hand to his that feels familiar in his sleep and a feeling of affection that lingers when he wakes up. 

Seamus doesn't know why he likes staring at photographs of the statue they call “frozen boy” so much. He can tell it looks objectively cool, with the incredibly realistic details in face and clothing, and it's a sight in a big city, but it's just a statue, and usually, Seamus doesn't give a damn about stonework, even if it's historic. But this one... there's just something about it that makes it feel familiar and dear to his heart, as if he actually knows the person it portraits. And his friends tease him about it relentlessly.  
So of course, when they graduate and plan a trip around the country before they part for university and work, his friends all want to drag him there. The town itself is historic, with lots of very old buildings and a fancy beach, which is the only interesting thing they can find about it on short notice, but the statue attracts visitors who couldn't care less for history every day, so they don't even feel embarrassed riding all the way there from Ireland just to swim and tease Seamus.  
And because he actually really likes his friends, he agrees. 

~~

They arrive in Canterbury on a rare, sunny day. It's cool outside, even though it's still early in September, but Seamus feels chilly for an entirely reason. They stroll through the newer streets, relying on Google Maps to find their destination, but as soon as they turn into an old street, Seamus stops in his tracks and almost chokes in his breath, because he feels like he knows this. The building to his right looks too familiar, and “The town square should be right ahead of us once we've turned the corner up there and get near the pottery” slips past his lips way too easily. Now if only he'd know why.  
His friends stare at him like he's nuts. That is, until they actually do round the corner and there's a statue to their right, and a little pottery next to something called “The old buttermarket”.  
“You googled that before, right?” One of his friends asks.  
“Yeah, sure”, Seamus says, distracted by the sight of the statue in front of him.  
They laugh at him and nag him, and then one of them shouts “Now that we're here, let Sea take a picture with it so he can pretend it's his stone boyfriend when we get home!”  
Seamus just laughs along, trying to ignore the weird feeling in his stomach and just be normal. So he lets himself get tugged along and, for shits and giggles, jumps up to the platform and waits for the guys to set up their phone cameras.  
Then he reaches for the statue, as if to drag it off of its pedestal.

As soon as he touches its outstretched hand, a headache sets in and he stumbles. There's pressure in his head, so much pressure, it feels like his eyes might pop out of their sockets at any moment now, like his head is just going to explode under the sheer force of memories currently hitting his synapses and rebuilding connections in his brain that he never knew he should have. The city he is in right now, but way younger, that he recognized because he lived here.  
Memories of almost two decades this body has never lived shoot through his head, first person pictures of a childhood so many years ago, all showing the same boy next to him, fading to show others of teenage years, wrapping his arm around the other boys' shoulders and laughing.  
'My brother, maybe?', he thinks for a second, though he knows it's wrong the moment the thought comes to mind. A friend, and way more than that. Someone he grew up with, yes, but so much more. Lost love, he recognizes deep in his heart. Another picture, further down he figures, late at night and the boy he loved looks so familiar. He's jumping up on a little platform, hand reached out towards Seamus and smiling so gorgeously. And Seamus recognises the pose as well, standing there exactly like the statue does nowadays, and he wants to yell for him to get down there, run, don't stand still because he'd never move again, but it's too late.  
He can watch the boy, Dean -Dean, he remembers now, his Dean!- slowly start to freeze and crystallise from his feet up to his hands, so quickly that not even his expression changes before he's fully transformed. He remembers what he felt at that very moment, remembers panic and loss and worry, so piercing like he's experiencing it for the first time again. How he couldn't walk up to Dean, because it felt as though the pedestal was keeping him off with an almost physical force, causing him to stumble backwards and fall and everything going black.  
He remembers a hundred moments of standing in front of that statue, the desperate feeing to reach out and touch it, but physically not being able to, never understanding why he was so desperate to just see it in front of him.  
The next thing he knows is that he's lying on the floor directly in front of the pedestal, just like he remembered falling. There is a single difference now, though. He can feel a body collapsed onto him. And he dares to hope, for just a single second more, before he opens his eyes. And there he is again. Shaking, pale even considering his dark skin, in clothes that surely weren't made for this century, and gasping for air like he needed to relearn how to breathe again. His Dean. Messy and confused, but his Dean. With all this, to Seamus, he's still beautiful.  
“Sea...Seamus?” His voice sounds incredibly raspy, like he hasn't used it in ages, and Seamus almost slaps his hand to his head. Yeah, of course he does, because he hasn't. For almost one and a half millennia. And Seamus still can't believe that he has him back now. He still can't believe he forgot, either.  
“Yeah, Dean, it's me. It's me, I can't believe... It's been so long... I missed you.”  
He's not entirely sure how he knows how much time has passed between both of his lives. He resigns to simply not caring, though.  
He's here, and he has Dean back. So he does what he has been wanting to do for two lives. He kisses Dean. And Dean, god help him, kisses back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I honestly had no clue which city this plays in when I started. It was pretty fictional, I only imagined it to be from around the late 500s AD and somewhere in western England to backcheck some historical events because sue me, but I suck at everything predating my birth, except for Greek and Roman times, and my own national history of the mid 20th century. And I remember that everyone hated France for the longest time ever (tbh, my history notes for the story feature variations of 'everyone still hates the French') so there's that. Then I got super frustrated about having to talk about it from Seamus' point, and started browsing. With Canterbury, things slipped a little towards the south west, but being founded in 597AD, it lends itself perfectly to the story. So if you know your way around there, tell me if you think Dean would fit in well!
> 
> Fun fact about the writing process: I attempted to do this very differently from what I usually do. When I hit writers block, I turned on italics and plotted, jumped back and forth to so single sentences. And then at some point I realised: Fuck, this is not plotting anymore, and I had typed about 80% of Dean watching the world in italics. Thats when I returned to normal typing. It was a very interesting experience I really suggest trying.


	2. My take on English History

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is literally just the short history notes I typed out for the story. You might be able to see where I stopped caring.

Brief history of England:   
500 to 850 AD: After Celtic battles, Anglo-Saxons rule over the lands.   
Mid 900s : Danish vikings invaded north-east england  
late 900s: anglo-Saxons fight back, lose,  
12th and 13th century: stories like lionheart and shit  
till 1362 french is national language due to invasion, 100 years war with France starts then, nobody likes France, modern english gets formed  
bubonic plague  
mid to late 1400s: Rose war, whatever that is, everyone still hates France   
1452 some mess in the royal family that shakespeare later writes about but why tf would Dean know that  
15hundreds: Union with wales, from 1564 shakespeare, rennaissance, further constant fights with the french because everyone hates them  
1600s: damn these protestants,religion wth, industrial revolution, a civil war starts   
1800: act of union merges GB and ireland  
Victorian era  
1900s two world wars, women finally get rights, you can see gay people yay

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is it apparently. I left this im my drafts for 28 days, thinking I might still edit some of this. Honestly? I don't know what else to do though. It took me so long to write this and I don't think changing anything else would get me closer to my original idea. So I decided to finally post it. I hope you enjoyed it and if you did, leave a kudos or a comment! Have a great day/evening/night!


End file.
